MAKE editor and Hackziner Brian Jepson recently met up with Joel Evans of Geek.com. Like any geeks worth their root access, Brian and Joel proceeded to do whatever they could to brick their respective XO laptops. Joel writes:
After we were done chatting, Brian wanted to show me some other hacking he’s done. In this case he built a pressure sensor out of a collection of electronics parts. Here’s how he did it: he took a force sensing resistor (you can get one from Trossen Robotics, Parallax, or Solarbotics), set it up with a 10k resistor and an LED for output, using the 5 volt USB port as a voltage source. Then, to protect the sound card from the voltage, he plugged a photo resistor into the microphone jack and pointed the LED at it, and ran the Measure activity that comes with the XO laptop. Each time you press down on the force sensing resistor, it makes the on-screen waveform jump around. Not bad for a $200 laptop.
One of my favorite moments was when Brian almost killed the OS install on both of our laptops. Notice how calm he is?
That’s our Brian!
Hacking the XO laptop – [via] Link
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